Don’t Look Now, but the Great Unbundling Has Spun Into Reverse

By Jeremy G. Philips

Feb. 14, 2017

The internet promised to be the great unbundler. The evisceration of distribution costs would free consumers from paying for cable television channels they never watched, allowing them to bypass cable monopolies and pay only for the shows they wanted. No longer would anyone have to buy a $99-a-month triple-play package when all they wanted was the History Channel.

Over the last two decades, consumers have felt liberated as traditional bundles unraveled — from music to media to retail.

For instance, Craigslist and myriad other digital start-ups siphoned lucrative job and real estate listings from traditional newspaper bundles. Meanwhile, media firms held onto the economically challenged business of delivering news and entertainment.

Proponents of the breakdown of the bundle economy most often cite cable television. Superficially, the evidence is compelling: In the last six years, pay TV penetration has declined from about 90 percent to 80 percent of homes — with more than two million homes cutting the cord in the last couple of years alone.

But paradoxically, the same forces that allowed classified ads and news to be so easily separated also drastically increased the economic rationale for bundling across the board.

Consumers merely have swapped one bundle for another (or often, several). There are more than 65 million subscribers to cheaper “over the top” packages provided by Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Sling TV and others (even excluding Amazon Prime Video). One does not always think of all of these as “bundles” because these services do not consistently categorize their content using the commonplace TV channel taxonomy. However, their aggregation of shows looks more and more like a traditional cable bundle.

We are in the age of the great rebundling, when firms use packages of services as a way to increase their scale advantage and thus deepen the moat around their businesses.

In music, the story is even starker than in television. At one time, consumers used to buy a collection of songs — on vinyl, cassette and then compact disc. It was possible to buy a single song or two in these formats, but the internet facilitated more and more people downloading individual tracks.

Yet, today, there is an inexorable consumer shift to all-you-can-eat bundles of music. Already more than 60 million people pay for Spotify, Apple Music and others. These music bundles will increasingly be combined with other services as well to build competitive advantage. This newspaper currently includes Spotify with certain new subscriptions. And it is easy to see how Google and Apple will increasingly integrate music packages into their broader suite of services (as Amazon already has).

Bundling has always worked well for products for which consumers have widely varying tastes and willingness to pay. The magic of bundle economics allows consumers to get more for less, while also maximizing revenue for the provider. Imagine that there are two hungry diners at a burger joint where the restaurant’s marginal cost of food is zero-ish. One customer is willing to fork over $5 for a burger and $1 for fries. The other will shell out $5 for fries but only $1 for a burger. By selling a la carte, the restaurant maximizes revenue by pricing each item at $5. Both consumers leave hungry, and the business takes in $10. However, both diners would snap up a $6 bundle, allowing them to sate their appetites while shelling out $12 in total. Everyone is better off (perhaps not healthwise).

In the digital environment, two additional forces are driving this tidal wave of digital bundling.

First, the near-zero marginal cost of distribution makes all-you-can-eat packages compelling. Even heavy users of streaming services can potentially be profitable customers if the underlying economics of rights payments are well managed.

The Federal Communications Commission appears to be relaxing its position on the bundling of data and services. The agency had been investigating the practice of “zero-rating,” whereby a wireless carrier like T-Mobile allows its subscribers unlimited music streaming without it counting toward their data cap. Recently, the F.C.C. dropped this investigation — believing that this kind of bundling is now commonplace in a competitive market. Plainly this is the thin edge of the wedge for net neutrality. Connectivity and cloud computing services will most likely start to include “unrated” services to differentiate themselves further from other commodity providers. In the short term, this shift will most likely be a boon for consumers. Time will tell whether this stifles long-range innovation — especially in bandwidth-intensive services such as video streaming.

Second, firms need to mitigate the high cost of attracting and retaining online consumers. Netflix can amortize the expense of acquiring and servicing a subscriber over the hundreds of dollars of revenue they will generate if they hang around for a couple of years. Selling individual shows for a few bucks a pop would be vastly more expensive in marketing, billing and service costs.

Tying several services together (even when they are not all directly complementary) increases customer loyalty. Amazon Prime has more than 66 million subscribers. Just a few years ago, it was mostly a free-shipping service. Now, it includes an extensive library of free e-books, videos and music. The large base of Prime subscribers makes life hard for would-be Amazon competitors — who have to contend not just with Amazon’s scale in any particular vertical but also the combined value of the eclectic products and services that Amazon bundles together. This value may also increase as artificial intelligence and machine learning help personalize these applications. Walmart may be four times larger than Amazon in retail, but Amazon’s bundle magnifies the impact of its size, reducing its scale disadvantage.

For insurgents, this trend complicates the already formidable challenge of competing with the likes of Google, Facebook and Apple — all of which have been adept at weaving various interconnected services together to magnify their scale advantage.

Technology investors are obsessed with network effects. These help make firms like Facebook and eBay so valuable — because additional users increase utility for everyone, making it hard for upstarts to compete. But investors often forget that network effects are just a subset of scale advantages. Superior scale is what protects most businesses from competition. It would be hard to start a business to take on Coca-Cola because of its size advantage — especially in local bottling, distribution and marketing.

During the road show for the 1995 initial public offering of Netscape, its chief executive, Jim Barksdale, famously commented that there are “only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is to unbundle.” For many firms, the bundle is not a decaying symbol of legacy distribution. Rather, it is the new network effect: a critical strategy to amplify scale in the hope of building or deepening a moat to protect against foes everywhere.

Jeremy G. Philips is a general partner at Spark Capital and an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School.